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As some companies have learned the hard way, growing a business with un-monitored cloud services can be expensive. Perhaps they pick a cloud service provider like Amazon Web services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud without truly knowing the costs. Others don’t monitor their usage and pay for services they never use.

Some companies learn from experience that it can be beneficial to use all three and have a multi-cloud strategy.

Of course the key to managing costs with cloud services is to start by knowing how much each service will cost upfront and compare them. After that, you’ll want to continuously monitor those services using a third-party tool like Unigma so you will know if you’re getting the performance you need and not overpaying for services you don’t use.

For my example, I started with two virtual machines and gave an instance name of “Testing”. I then selected Linux as my operating system. As you can see from the drop down below, there are several operating system choices.

Each one of these examples uses the same configuration for each instance. For my example, I chose 32 cores per machine and 64GB of memory. I selected US East Coast, but there are several choices for locale.

For my initial test, I picked a server that would run roughly 8 hours per day for five days a week to emulate an average work week.

As you can see from the output below, even with only two machines running for 40 hours a week, there is a dramatic difference between the monthly cost of each service.

Knowing that most businesses will need their services available 24/7, I ran the same scenario, but this time selected 24 hours per day and seven days a week. Interestingly enough, the per month price did not change for Amazon or Azure. However, Google’s service is slightly less expensive than the 40 hour per week selection because increasing the hours lowers the cost per hour.

While two machines might be great for a company that’s just starting out, we all hope to grow our business and services. One of the great things about cloud-based services is that they can easily be scaled to meet our needs. In this case, I ran another comparison but this time using 10 virtual machines or instances with the same specifications.

Since we were increasing the capacity by five times (from 2 to 10 virtual machines), would the price be five times as expensive?

Without an annual contract, this simply isn’t the case. The cost to move from two instances to 10 instances (five times the number of machines) will actually cost you 10 times as much money.

The pricing does go down for Amazon and Azure when you include an annual contract. However, Amazon wants a 1-3 year commitment, where Google does not.

In most cases, you still need to pay a large upfront fee in order to get a lower per month cost. It’s also worth noting that when selecting 10 machines, Google without a contract is still cheaper than Amazon or Azure as you continue to scale the number of machines required.

Conclusion

Using the Unigma pricing comparison will help you estimate the costs of Amazon EC2, Azure, and Google VMs side-by-side. This is a great way to find out the real costs of web services before making a purchase. Unigma is a full cloud management platform and can help monitor your clouds, manage and lower cost and automate to save you time.

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The machines you’re using in your article above don’t come even close to an apples-to-apples comparison. Look at the screen prints… the Azure option includes DOUBLE the memory of the Amazon option. And what storage and networking options are included and available and how much do they cost?

I think this is a great idea… you might need to include more information and offer more options to get a good comparison between services, however.